Page:Du Faur - The Conquest of Mount Cook.djvu/145

Rh had camped in the open, where I could at least have seen what my equine friends were about, and probably would not have attracted their attention at all. I welcomed the first signs of dawn after passing anything but a restful night.

We made an early start to avoid toiling up the glacier in the worst of the midday heat, which is apt to prove a discouraging experience. Traversed in the cool hours of the early morning, it is easy to appreciate some of the wonderful beauty with which the route is strewn.

We left the hut at dawn, when all the glacier was still and silent. No rocks clattered down the great wave-like banks of moraine. Even in the troughs all was frozen; no murmur of trickling water or dull boom of underground streams disturbed the silence. Our restless ant-like procession, struggling along from wave to wave, was the only moving thing in a desolate world of piled-up stones and blackened ice. From the top of the last moraine there opens out a view of mile after mile of hummocky ice, rising steadily and crowned on either side with magnificent peaks. As we proceeded the sun rose from behind the shoulder of Malte Brun, and in a twinkling the dead ice woke to a shimmer of crystal and silver. Little streams began to trickle with a faint metallic tinkle, and underground waters murmured and gurgled in far-away caverns, while the widening cracks and fissures veined the white ice with translucent blue.

Once more the frozen world was awake in all its beauty of blues and greens, whose perfect tones serve but to heighten the dazzling silver whiteness of the ice. Not far away a glacier stream, the receptacle of many tinkling tributaries, has hollowed out a steep and narrow valley, a cañon walled with precipitous ice-cliffs, here smooth and shining as satin, there carved and moulded into a hundred fantastic shapes. At their feet the deep blue water swirls along in its satin-smooth bed, hurrying towards a distant